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13 Jun Political Science is an Academic Death Cult by Bill Buppert

“Yes, you are right — I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.”

– Mark Twain

I majored in Political Science as a youth when I attended college and was completely immune and unaware at the time of just what I was studying and undertaking as a collegial vocation. I had not even the vaguest notion that when all the familiar layers are peeled back and the countless variations of sub-disciplines are explored, it all comes down to one central principle and no other no matter how hard you rationalize it: all political systems rely on violence to work, nothing less and nothing more. Worse yet, they rely on initiated violence and all its subtle and savage applications. Once you discover that police are the center of gravity and schwerpunkt for the lion’s share of political heavy-lifting, you wonder why an academic shotgun wedding between “criminal justice” and political science has not appeared yet.

No other academic discipline has done more to put the gun in the hands of government. And justify it.

What inspired this was a conversation one of my readers had with me about his relative who is a Political Science professor at a university (we know they aren’t heteroversities because only one brand of government supremacism is permitted). His professorial relation was having a tough time getting his mind wrapped around a stateless society and claimed something that stopped me in my tracks. I am paraphrasing but the claim was that he simply was not interested in the moral and ethical implications of his work. These notions are anachronistic, bourgeois or intolerable in polite discussion in the faculty lounge unless…it was used as a lever to increase the power of the state. Then the graybeards in the lounge would nod approvingly as the latest idiotic gibbering from an Occupy Wall Street waif were commented upon or some worthy would talk about the virtue of the people in seeking to have the government step in and regulate the size of fruit or the pressure applied to a man’s groin to search him at an airport.

Let’s face it, all universities are public schools in the sense that they are largely subsidized by the state in funding, research, subsidy of student loans and all the other regulatory baggage that makes these schools into the institutions of advanced shambling and idiocy they are today. Plenty of other observers such as Sowell, O’Rourke and Bovard have penned wonderful bromides about the inadequacy, inefficiency and sheer lunacy of American academia today but few seem to have noticed that for the most part, the political science departments have one charter: to rationalize violence against their fellow planet dwellers whether the domestic machinations of making governments bigger and better or the more exotic foreign policy shenanigans of making excuses for the global war against brown people and folks who don’t share the “democratic ideal” (Gods help us).

So let’s test the thesis. Go to the American Political Science Association website and look for conference papers and I want you to find a paper that does not imply and infer initiated violence in the abstract (I would not wish to ask anyone to read these things) for non-compliance with a government law, initiative or edict. In other words, I am positing that the right to refusal is the ultimate liberty as I have discussed before as long as one is not harming another. What you will find is all kinds of pithy observations, sophisticated hypotheses and prettily worded justifications for non-consensual mechanisms or small groups of folks to command obedience from all they survey or said miscreants and dissenters will be fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed or killed depending on the severity of their refusal or temerity to disobey.

The Juris Doctorate (JD) or law degree is a closely wedded organism to the Political Science discipline in that the legal excesses of America such as the death penalty, unlimited and atomistic surveillance, torture and countless more barbarisms perpetrated by the government everyday find a rich intellectual lodestar to justify the anti-civilizational imperative that is the state. For every Nozick or Block in the academy, there are legions of government supremacist scholars and intellectuals who leave no stone unturned to advocate for violence by the state against the hapless denizens within its borders and without. Sowell is fond of saying the largest population of Marxists on Earth are in American universities and he is right but that is simply one of the collectivist menagerie that inhabits the schools. There are the Lincoln hagiographers and neoconservative Trotskyites and Straussians who make a vocal minority of alleged right wing opinion in the universities but they are actually simply a branch off the giant oak of violence advocacy that is the entire political science discipline. Even the self-named Peace Studies sub-discipline is rather pointed about threats and war as a means to either bring or establish peace. And, in the end, imposing government structures based on initiated violence.

Political Science is no more a science than sociology or psychology and the other “social[ist] science” disciplines mired in hard science envy for certitude and empiricism. Every university should have an altar and evening entrails reading at government erected Trofim Lysenko Memorials to add some magic and mystery to their undertakings. Political science is the military wing of Lysenkoism. It is a vast raft of intellectual rationalization for initiated force and violence against individuals and huge swaths of humans to make them obey the fever-dreams of collectivism that fire the minds of political scientists everywhere. As Professor Rummel, one of the few anti-violence political science practitioners on earth has pointed out, democide or death by government has murdered hundreds of millions of humans outside warfare in the twentieth century alone.

I have often wondered how cops would be incentivized if their everyday job behavior could cost them their jobs and all future livelihood for the rest of their lives if their perennial abuses were not socialized over the taxpayers in their towns and cities for their bad judgment and violence against civilians. By extension, would it not be intriguing if all the collectivist fetishists in the American academy had to actually live in the societies they advocate for and had to live in isolated colonies for a long period of time under the rules they advocate? You want government provisioned health care? Then go to Cuba for a year or live in a hermetically sealed colony with some of your faculty lounge confreres and see how that goes for you. All voluntary, of course, I would never be as presumptuous as a political scientist to impose violence on my neighbor nor consider them my property. The possibilities are endless.

I am standing by for hate mail.

Sacred cows make the best burgers.

“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.”– John Hay

Alright, Jesse, challenge accepted. I have one root question: is there a consistent pattern of not divining the difference between causative and correlative explanations for phenomena in the soft sciences e.g., mistaking one for the other and does this cause some cynicism among folks when they constantly hear conflicting conclusions from self-same “scientists”? One more question. Does the complexity of human systems and interaction make it almost impossible to assign causative explanations? In other words, take global warming, is it possible for the hard scientists much less the soft scientists to establish the direct (or indirect causation) for anthropogenic linkage to global climate change? Correlation is the poor man’s lame explanation for different phenomenon but causation with certitude is the gold standard.

mitspanner

In my earliest days as higher ed student I was drawn to the social sciences. I hungered to know what makes the society tick. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that it was all a massive “publik works”” program.

Most people who live on taxpayer money are completely oblivious to the coercion that supports their livelihoods. And coercion underwrites virtually all of “Political Science” as it starts with the premise that it’s right and proper to take from people by force in order to achieve some nonspecific and often non-measurable gain elsewhere. Of course, the real test of utility and desirability would be whether people could be persuaded to spend their money on it without coercion. Political scientists never seem to want to be bothered with that detail – they prefer to pick up a gun and proceed from there.